Tagged: Neurocognition

A groundbreaking new research study by Susumu Tonegawa’s team at MIT has opened up grounds for debate in the ethics of neuroscience once again. In Tonegawa’s experiment, neuroscientists were able to implant memories into the brains of mice using optogenetics, a technology in which specific cells can be turned on or off by exposure to a certain wavelength of light. The specific memory manipulated in this study was a conditioned fear response in mice to a mild electrical foot shock.

Researchers in Tonegawa’s lab began by engineering mice hippocampal cells to express channelrhodopsin, a protein that activates specific neurons when stimulated by light. Channelrhodopsin was also modified to be produced whenever c-fos, a gene necessary for memory formation, was turned on. On day one, the engineered mice explored Room A without any exposure to foot shock; the mice behaved normally. As the mice explored this room, their memory cells were labeled with channelrhodopsin. On day two, the same mice were placed into Room B, a distinctly different room, where a foot shock was received; the mice exhibited a fear response. While receiving the foot shocks, channelrhodopsin was activated via optogenetics causing the fear response to be encoding not only to Room B, but Room A as well. To test this hypothesis, the mice were brought back to Room A on day three.